'Crucial knot'
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WARSAW, Poland — An anti-marriage movement followed by no-fault divorce and a push to legalize same-sex marriages combine to threaten the family and society, said Elder Bruce C. Hafen of the Seventy, who serves as president of the Europe Central Area.
Elder Hafen was one of many speakers at the World Congress of Families IV held in Warsaw on May 11-13. The congress attracted 3,300 delegates from around the world, all of whom have an interest in preserving the values and legal rights of the "natural family."
"Marriage has always been the crucial knot in the fabric that holds society together. Every marriage affects those in the concentric circles of influence that ripple outward from the couple, through their children to the larger community. That is why guests and friends have always celebrated weddings as community events," Elder Hafen said.
He used the Irish Claddaugh Ring to illustrate society's interest in marriage and the family. The ring, familiar to many, has two hands joined by a heart and capped by a crown. The hands and heart symbolize the couple's commitment to each other; the crown symbolizes society's interest in the marriage and family.
"To marry is to make a public commitment that one accepts personal responsibility for one's children and for their influence on the kind of community we create over time. Indeed, it is precisely this public part of marriage that distinguishes it from all other relationships and contracts." Elder Hafen called marriage "our first and most important social institution."
Threats to the institution of marriage threaten the stability of society. Elder Hafen said growing global political pressures offer legal rights to unmarried couples and that the recognition of same-sex marriages constitutes some of the largest threats to the stability of the family. He said a commission in France wrote recently that marriage has "lost its magic for young people," who increasingly feel that "love is essentially a private matter which leaves no room" for the state to say anything about their marriage or their children.
"We can see the force of an anti-marriage revolution in those statistics showing skyrocketing unwed births, cohabitation, and divorces. Each trend has its own causes, but all were accelerated by a series of liberation movements that together flew the flag of individual rights as their primary banner."
The legal theory of individual rights and the civil rights movement of the 1960s played an important role in overcoming America's "shameful racial discrimination and much unfair gender-based discrimination," Elder Hafen said. However, some extremist critics went much further, using "rights" language to challenge laws and customs that supported family relationships.
The no-fault divorce movement, which began in the late 1960s in California, originally was meant to eliminate the messiness of establishing personal "fault" in a divorce case. "But with the strong winds of the liberation movements blowing through their courtrooms, these judges simply didn't have the will or the wits to resist someone who wanted 'out' of a marriage-even if that person's partner wanted to keep the marriage alive."
Social scientists during the 1970s and 1980s failed to address the effects of the revolution on children, and, therefore, on the society those children were creating. "But in more recent years, a flood of new research has demonstrated the personal and social harm of doubling the divorce rate and quintupling the rate of unwed births," Elder Hafen said. "The New York Times in 2001 reported a 'powerful consensus' among social scientists that 'from a child's point of view ... the most supportive household is one with two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage."'
Elder Hafen said the debate about same-gender marriage "is potentially a good thing because it will force us to clarify what marriage is, and should be, at a time when the anti-marriage revolution has already caused many people to lose their bearings about marriage."
Advocates for same-gender marriage argue from the same individual rights legal theory that fueled the anti-marriage revolution and no-fault divorce. "When the law upholds an individual's right to end a marriage, regardless of social consequences, as happened with no-fault divorce, that same legal principle can be used to justify the individual's right to start a marriage, regardless of social consequences, as happens with same-gender marriage."
